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Public Meeting in Cork: Tues 14th

This coming Tuesday, December 14th, CPPC are holding a public meeting at the Metropole Hotel on Mac Curtain Street, Cork – it starts at 7.30pm and will continue up to 10.00pm. The title for the meeting is:

Only The People Should Decide!

Everyone concerned with the question of democracy is invited to come to the meeting, as are any organisations, groups or political parties of the people. The spokesperson for CPPC, Diarmaid Ó Cadhla, will address the meeting and outline CPPC’s analysis and our policy of democracy – a period for discussion will follow.

CPPC’s approach to politics is entirely new, a party with only one policy, Democracy! However, we feel this approach is exactly what is required today, all questions of policy should be decided by the people, we don’t need to be presented with a ‘shopping list’ of policies and asked to support one particular package or another, and then to hand our power of decision making over to the writers of these shopping lists, i.e. the political parties. This traditional approach is both an insult to the intelligence of people and it is also what has allowed us to fall into such deep crisis. We need to empower people in their constituencies and communities, that is the aim and only purpose of CPPC – we have no other agenda. We have also outlined how this empowerment of the people can take place, through creating the Peoples Conventions. We call on all democratic minded people to take up this task and to make it their own, with their own organisations or directly with CPPC, it doesn’t matter how.

The current crisis demands democracy as its solution

These days one might easily be consumed in the debate about the economy or in campaigning to influence one party or another to adopt more ‘pro-social’ or ‘people friendly’ measures, or even advocating a party that offers more‘people friendly’ policies. However the danger in this is the inbuilt logic of handing over our decision making to those same apparent ‘pro-people’ parties, in the hope that that they will act “for us” etc. People are of course right to voice their protest and demand their rights, it is important to do so, however more important is to fix the root problem.

It is not a question of ‘left’ or ‘right’

Today, the temptation is to think in terms of either ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ politics, this is also a mistake because it immediately divides people based on some perceived, not defined, policies. Such left/right division again asks people to hand their power to one party or another, vote, and then forget it for the next few years – hoping that someone elected will do some good for us, through making deals, manoeuvring etc.

The point about this is that we must act for ourselves, the people must be the decision makers – through first selecting, then electing and then mandating our representatives. We must also retain the right of recalling representatives that fail to carry out the will of the people.

We must move away from having politicians be the ones who dispense our rights to us, when the vested interests that back them deem it prudent to do so or when they think a future vote might be secured.

We ask all democratic minded people to come forward.

What is needed now is for people to come forward and take a stand for democracy, let’s not remain busy doing the wrong things, fighting the wrong fight, or playing the game of politics as dictated by the ‘powers-that-be’! It is time to declare emphatically that only the people should decide! Let’s make a reality of this!